Gremlins in the Panel

     I have been having some intermittent electrical problems.  Minor but irritating.  Suddenly the VHF wouldn't work or some odd issue.  After a boat has been around for a few years things get added. A light here, a pump there, a circuit that's not quite up to par, you get the idea, and if you own an older boat you know that after awhile things start getting messy & jumbled up.  I had several breakers & switches that I had no idea what they did.

    The original wiring in this boat was done well.  I have spent the last few months finding & identifying wires and switches.  I decided it was time to straighten out a few things & label as much as I could.  I started with the main fuse panel.


    I was inspired by a friend of mine whose nearly 20 year old center console was in need of some electrical TLC.  He completely rewired the entire boat and I helped him make a new panel complete with the boat logo, some cool LED lighting and some nicely laid out switches with built in breakers (about $50 each, & probably 10 or so of those).  His completed job looks like the inside of the space shuttle. Probably overkill but very nice, functional & easy to figure out when something goes wrong.

    I removed the old fused panel & divided the 15 Amp breakered circuit into 2 separate breakers, the original 15 Amp with 4 fused circuits & another 25 Amp with 8 fused circuits.


    I used a separate ground bar.  The original fused panel had an isolated 10 Amp circuit for the ignition.  Initially I missed that and didn't plan on it when buying the panels so I improvised and  cut one of the fuse carriers off of the panel and made a separate circuit.

 

    Once everything was in, I zipped tied it & labeled it.  I am not sure if I have all of the fuses correctly sized so I will work on that.


    I am not an electrical engineer so go easy on me, but if you see some gross error, please comment so I can straighten it out.

    

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